The flame burns on: Leonard Cohen has the last word in his posthumous book

For the Montreal musical icon, the collection — which spans six decades of notebook excerpts, lyrics, poems, even sketches — "was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end."

If you’ve got it handy, pull out your copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen — LP or CD, though the former is better, being bigger — and look at the back cover. The image there, often assumed to depict Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, is in fact a piece of Mexican religious folk art, chosen by Cohen to represent, in his words, “the triumph of spirit over matter — the spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains and fire and prison.”

Fire and flame are multi-purpose motifs throughout Cohen’s writings and songs — so much so that when it came time to choose a title for the book of poems and other writings on which he was working feverishly right up until his death on Nov. 7, 2016, son Adam Cohen was in no doubt.

“He lit the flames and he tended to them diligently,” writes Adam in his introduction to the book that now sees the light of day as The Flame: Poems and Selections from the Notebooks (McClelland & Stewart, 275 pp, $32.95).

“It was a state of emergency,” said The Flame’s co-editor Alexandra Pleshoyano, talking about Cohen’s determination, at age 82, to get the project finished in the face of pain from spinal stress fractures and the effects of leukemia, a combination that weakened him to a state where a fall in his Los Angeles home proved fatal.

“But it was that way all his life, really. Even when there were long gaps (between albums and books), he was always, always writing.”

It’s a truth underlined further by Adam Cohen, whose introduction tells how, for his father, the book “was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”

And it all chimes with the artist himself. He frequently claimed that nothing made him happier than the act of leaving a previously white page “blackened” with his poetry and prose.

Université de Sherbrooke professor and Montreal native Pleshoyano came to her role in The Flame via an unconventional route: she’s the first to admit she got out of the Cohen blocks uncommonly late. And that was despite spending parts of her youth at her father’s house on Cedar Ave. in Westmount, just a couple of streets from where Cohen grew up on Belmont Ave. And despite being of the generation that stoked Cohen’s late-1980s comeback. She was only marginally aware of him until, in 2004 at age 42, a chance encounter with some Dutch Cohen fans converted her.

“A bunch of young people were coming out of a bar, singing a Cohen song in Dutch, although I didn’t know that. We got talking and they said ‘What? You’re from Quebec and you don’t know Leonard Cohen?’ I felt like an idiot.”

Six years later, Pleshoyano had secured a grant to write about Cohen and Jewish mysticism, and was doing graduate work in Strasbourg, France, when Cohen’s Grand Tour came to town. Through a connection with a Swiss Cohen scholar, she found herself having dinner with him. The two spoke of their common interest in the Kabbalah and the Israeli philosopher and scholar Gershom Scholem.

In the ensuing years, Pleshoyano’s standing as a Cohen expert grew. She served, for instance, as a consultant to the Musée d’art contemporain’s A Crack in Everything exhibition, a tribute to Cohen.

She came to the attention of Cohen’s manager, Robert Kory, the man instrumental in reviving Cohen’s finances after the embezzlement he suffered at the hands of his previous manager, Kelley Lynch. Six months after Cohen died, when the time came to organize his vast archive of papers and sketchbooks, and to craft them into a book, Pleshoyano got the call along with co-curator Robert Faggen.

Self-portraits were often accompanied by words expressing the first thoughts that came into his mind upon waking up.2018 Old Ideas LLC /
McClelland & Stewart

It was a job that could fairly be described as Herculean. It involved transcribing thousands of pages of archives gathered over six decades — a task that fell mostly to Faggen, who dealt heroically with Cohen’s not especially neat handwriting. Then there was the matter of putting it all in some kind of order, an undertaking complicated by Cohen’s idiosyncratic approach to dating the material: jumping around by years from page to page, sometimes literally having the work of separate eras side by side. Not entirely surprising, given that he was known to work on a single poem or song for years, it still invites a bit of speculation. Might it all have been a deliberate ploy to throw future scholars off the trail?

“He was into mischief — and mystery,” said Pleshoyano. “So that’s certainly not inconceivable.”

In the end, the determining factor was mostly the order in which the writings appeared. Clearing the technical hurdles, Pleshoyano and Faggen put together a sequence of previously unpublished poems, lyrics for the late-period albums (often slightly but enticingly different from what ended up being sung), reproductions from the notebooks, and other late-life documents. Resisting the temptation to provide extensive marginalia and footnotes — “That would have made it an academic book, and that’s the last thing he would have wanted,” Pleshoyano said — they have assembled an illuminating and seamlessly readable volume that will be manna to Cohen fans worldwide.

What’s likely to cause the most surprise, though, is the visual component of The Flame. More than a hundred drawings and paintings from Cohen’s sketchbooks enhance the text, chosen by Pleshoyano from among roughly 400 provided. Many are self-portraits, though the designation doesn’t indicate their range: in 2003 alone Cohen did a self-portrait every day, in a variety of media, often with accompanying words expressing the first thoughts that came into his mind upon waking up.

Nothing made Leonard Cohen happier than leaving a white page “blackened” with his words.HO /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Pleshoyano placed them in thematically appropriate places alongside the poems and lyrics, creating combinations that are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and always complementary.

Next to a poem in which Cohen writes “I feel ridiculous / in my grey suit / and my pomaded hair” appears a line drawing of the artist looking heavily pomaded, à la I’m Your Man.

The lyrics to the Anjani song Thanks for the Dance are accompanied by a painting done in a style evocative of Toulouse Lautrec.

More than once, Cohen presents himself staring at his own reflection, though the effect is somehow never narcissistic.

“Mirrors are very important to Cohen,” said Pleshoyano, who often slips into referring to her subject in the present tense. “When he first auditioned for (Columbia Records executive) John Hammond he had to stand in front of a mirror in order to perform. (Hammond signed Cohen in 1967.) They appear all through his work. He was an insecure person, and I think for him mirrors were a way of being sure he hadn’t disappeared.”

He needn’t have worried about that.

Adam Cohen has confirmed that a posthumous album is in the planning stages. It will comprise Cohen’s fifteenth studio collection, consisting of songs post-dating You Want it Darker, the 2016 album previously assumed to be his last musical testament.

And in the pages of The Flame, Leonard Cohen feels more present than ever.

In 1961, the Montreal Gazette said of Leonard Cohen’s writing: âWe are witnessing the rise of an excellent poet.âDominique Isserman /
Sony Music Entertainment Canada

Instalments in a lifelong project: A set collects the Cohen books neatly

To coincide with The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is providing a fine corrective for those whose Cohen shelves are in mismatched disarray: a uniform edition, sold in separate volumes, of his first six poetry collections and two novels. While each is its own beast, it’s striking how they can also be read as a single entity, instalments in an unbroken lifelong project. Add to these The Flame, and the collections Book of Mercy and Book of Longing, and you’ll pretty much have the lot.

Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956

Bearing traces of a young man’s earnestness — the poems were written between the ages of 15 and 20, so let’s not judge — Cohen’s debut nonetheless contains enough of what was to come that you can imagine the excitement among the few who saw it when new. Besides, it’s often the simplest poems — see Rites, about a boy grieving for his father — that are the most affecting.

Leonard Cohen, circa 1964.MONTREAL GAZETTE

The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961

The Montreal Gazette said: “We are witnessing the rise of an excellent poet.” All things considered, it wasn’t a bad call. Cohen, the conflicted aesthete and seeker, torn between the worldly and the monastic, emerges fully here.

The Favourite Game, 1963

If Cohen had never written anything else, this audacious coming-of-age novel would still stand proud as a Canadian classic. A Montreal novel to stand alongside the best of Gabrielle Roy, Mavis Gallant, Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler.

Flowers for Hitler, 1964

The title, and the epigraph from Primo Levi, hint at what would be a Cohen trademark: a compulsion to visit the darkest places of history, and a perfect willingness to risk offence. Cohen himself called this a masterpiece on publication. From the beyond, he dares us to disagree.

Parasites of Heaven, 1966

No one had any idea of it at the time, but within a year and a half Cohen would be a celebrated singer-songwriter. His last pre-fame collection is thus a goldmine for readers seeking to chart how the poems bled into the songs and vice versa. For example, an untitled poem beginning “Suzanne … ” evolved into a song of that name you may have heard.

Beautiful Losers, 1966

A novel with a higher experimental quotient than most readers might normally accept found its way into the world as a trashy-cover mass-market paperback after Cohen’s breakthrough as a musician. It was a true Trojan Horse operation, insinuating the name of Kateri Tekakwitha into world literature and leaving Cohen batting a perfect 1.000 on the novel front.

At the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970.Tony Russell /
GETTY

The Energy of Slaves, 1972

As with so much Cohen, this collection is powered by paradox: poems about the loss of the poet’s poetic powers attain their own poetic power. Cohen is at his most concentrated and economical here — there’s lots of white space, but every word counts.

Death of a Lady’s Man, 1978

Maybe people have been scared off by the title’s close resemblance to that of Death of a Ladies’ Man, the most problematic album in the Cohen catalogue. Whatever the reason, you sense that we are still catching up with this book. Its mix of verse with prose poems and Nabokov-like self-commentaries will be fodder for Cohen nation in perpetuity.

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